2023-11-17 - Sol Foundation Symposium "Karl Nell on The Schumer Amendment & Controlled Disclosure"

Thank you. Thank you very much. It's really a pleasure and an honor to be here. And just the sincerest thanks to Gary and Peter and Saul for putting this together. And it's really a combination of I think decades of work of all the people in the audience and other folks that have brought us to this stage. And thanks also to Dan Sheehan and his new Paradigm Institute coming at this from the philosophical ethical perspective as well. I think Diana had a great point where she said it's almost this emergent properties that come out of a collaboration. In some sense, Schumer is sort of an example of this. Some people ask, where does this Schumer thing come from? And maybe I can touch on that a little bit because I think it's really an example of what she was talking about, this sort of emergent, and sometimes this collaboration isn't necessarily even overt.

(01:23)
It's one group inspires another group to do certain things. There's a dynamic there. But first, what is the Schumer amendment? Well, 10 years ago, probably the Schumer Amendment would've been viewed as U-A-P U-F-O disclosure, and the amendment seeks to very clearly clarify what the scope is of their problem set and what they're trying to do about it. But probably the recognition really ought to go to some silent few on the hill in terms of the full-time staffers that really we're seeing this thing through. But the thing that enabled that to happen was a lot of the work that's happened out here in the audience and out here in the community, and that enabled and set the conditions for the staff to have the confidence to move forward to implement this type of legislation, obviously with the majority leader and a complete bipartisan coalition doing this to make that happen.

(02:20)
I'll talk a little bit about the amendment, the reasons for it, and then maybe a linkage into possible ways forward that might link into some opportunities for the foundation and the folks that are participating here. So what are these sort of emergent factors that happen? Well, I think Leslie Keen's article, as everyone is familiar, was a key C state change in precipitating the removal of a lot of the stigma that surrounded this topic. And of course coincident with that, the work of Chris Mellon and Lue Elizondo in getting those videos released and adding their names and reputations to the topic to move it forward. So certainly that was a key incident. The next piece was, I would argue the David Rush, Ryan Graves, David Fravor testimony before Congress, again, lowering the threshold of making this topic respectable and incentivizing some discussion about it. So you'll notice if you look at the timeline there on the left, that the approval of the amendment was maybe a day after that hearing.

(03:25)
So I don't think those are necessarily synchronized. The work for Schumer was going on in the background, but all these contributive factors were lowering that threshold for making this acceptable. So if you look at the folks that are actually supporting this, you've got two folks on the SASC, you've got two folks on the sissy, you've got complete bipartisanship, right? You've got Rounds and Schumer that are sponsors, but of course you've got Senator Gillibrand and Senator Rubio from the left and the right supporting it, and you've got Senator Heinrich and Young. And the other interesting takeaway from this is there's two people that are sponsoring this bill that are on the Gang of Eight. So the Gang of Eight was really a concept that got created out of the Church commission when there was intel oversight concerns back in the sixties and the seventies where there were activities going on that Congress was not aware of and that were essentially illegal. And so there was a structure put in place such that certain key members of Congress would be legally entitled to hear about all information that pertained to the equities of Title 10 and Title 50. And so that created this concept of the Gang of eight, which is the majority leader and the minority leader in the Senate, the speaker and the minority leader in the house, and then the ranking and chairs of each of the Intel committees. So that's eight folks. So these folks are the people in Congress that are aware of all the information.

(04:55)
So that should sink in. There are two people that are sponsoring this in Congress that say, we need this legislation because things aren't working right, and these are the people that are read into everything. So a lot of times when you get legislation, it's either driven by lobbyists, frankly, or you've got to read the whole thing and you're wondering, what the heck were these people thinking when they wrote this? Why did they do this? Well, in this case, the senators put into the bill the exact reasons why they were doing the bill. And this is like section two of the legislation. You can see at the bottom, like the references, you can go online and look it up, the actual verbiage. So this is a summary, but essentially what they're saying is we want to preserve and centralize all records related to this topic, and we'll get into how we're defining terms here in a minute.

(05:47)
But they feel that it's more important to pull these records out of the individual Controlling authorities' possession and integrating them together in the National archives is more important than having a distributed decentralized control of the records. That's the number one thing. Number two, there's a presumption of disclosure. So that doesn't mean that we're going to think about whether the stuff should be made available. It means that there's the presumption and there's got to be an argument against if they're not going to be disclosed. So it's very significant. The third thing is that this legislation need to create an enforceable, accountable, and deterministic process for this to happen. In other words, this isn't going to happen by itself, it hasn't happened yet. And so overt explicit measures need to be taken in law in order to cause this to happen. And the amendment is very specific on the mechanisms that are going to be used to do that.

(06:46)
The fourth piece is, and a lot of people in the audience probably know Freedom of Information Act kind of doesn't work. The government knows it doesn't work. In some cases that's kind of good from their perspective, but even given noble intent, freedom of information is very bureaucratic and very administratively onerous and it's not really very effective. But the fifth piece here is even more interesting, and this is again in the amendment verbatim, and this is a Declaration of Congress. So they've researched this and they've declared that some UAP records are exempt from Mandatory Declassification review under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954. So unlike the uk, some other countries, the United States, there is a mechanism to classify information and the records undergo a review every so often, usually 25 years or so. But it depends on the specific information. So there's some subset of records that the Congress has found evade this mandatory declassification review, and they're stating that that's due to the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.

(08:00)
So you can imagine some of the sort of historical background that might've precipitated that post World War II Manhattan Project sightings going on at that time and using that same security apparatus for this topic. So that's a very significant finding that Congress is putting out there for folks that are paying attention. The sixth piece, and probably one of the most important from the perspective of free Society is that congresses determined that there's not proper oversight over this information. And that's sort of implicit in the fact that the Gang of eight have not been read into what's happening. And they've only found that out through whistleblower and other testimonies, and many of this is closed door. But the other point about this, which is very mature and very gratifying, and again, I think links to what Diana was saying about this sort of collaboration and emergent way of working the legislative branch is not making themselves the antagonist of the executive branch.

(09:00)
The legislation explicitly states that, Hey, legislative branch, you're in the same boat we are. Neither the executive nor the legislative has proper oversight over this problem. And that's explicit in the legislation. And the seventh piece is, why do we care? Well, we care because we can't do open scientific research and we care because we're concerned about technological surprise and we're concerned about the public interest and the public good. And so the legislation's explicit about all of that. So it's very important, and I'd encourage anybody to go look at section two of the legislation and read the verbatim what they're saying here. Alright, so what's actually the scope? And so this is probably a good point to talk about terminology. So a lot of the stigma has been removed by sort of changing terms of reference. So we went from UFO flying saucer ET to UAP.

(09:58)
And so UAP is probably a more accurate term, it's a phenomena, and that could be a range of things from metaphysical to psychosocial to nuts and bolts to religious to consciousness. There's a whole range of things. So this was actually very helpful in a intentional ambiguity to allow consensus to occur around the topic at the same time as that we're moving historical stigma. And so in candor, that's actually allowed legislators to come together in NDAs 21, 22, and in 23 to make progress on the topic. But I think a lot of folks would agree that the problem comes in when you actually want to address what the underlying issue is. And so if you look at what Arrow is doing, for instance, what problem are they actually solving? UAP is so broad, even in an operational sense, it could be probably four different problems. It could be the air trash range safety problem that Ryan Graves has highlighted.

(10:59)
So effectively it could be the intel problem, intel surprise problem of the China balloon, if you will. It could be foreign strategic reconnaissance or it could be unknown, unknown, or it could be technological surprise. So those are a range of problems that are all kind of different in how you would address them. Range safety and airspace. Deconflict is a joint all domain command and control problem. It's a real time safety issue. The intel surprise issue is a national security defense issue. The technological surprise issue is an R&D issue. So you've got this range and we're not even getting to the potential metaphysical consciousness, other aspects of the problem. So what the Schumer Amendment does is they try to basically reverse the trend of expanding the scope of the term to narrow it down to a hardcore where progress can now be made in this next phase.

(11:55)
And then perhaps as we make further progress, we can identify other avenues of approach that might actually then be more efficacious to expand the definition. So let me read here what the actual legislation says. So we know specifically what the intended with Schumer, UAP is any object operating or judge capable of operating in outer space, the atmosphere, ocean surface or undersea, lacking prosaic attribution due to performance characteristics and properties not previously known to be achievable based upon commonly understood principles of physics. And you can see the six observables there that have been made so popular by Lu Elizondo. So the term prosaic attribution is going to be defined here in a minute, but what we're basically saying is this stuff is the unknown unknown category. And that's what we're talking about when we're talking about disclosure. So the other term of reference that's important to understand is TNO temporarily non attributed object.

(12:59)
And there's a huge distinction between these, and Schumer makes this explicit. So TNO is a class of objects that temporarily resist prosaic attribution by the initial observer performance or due to environmental or system limitations associated with the observation process, but that nevertheless have a known accepted human origin. So TNO is the stuff that you mistake at the time of observation, but you later figure out what it's, so if you look at Blue Book, depending on the statistics you want to use, the 94% or the 80% of what they spent their time on was t and o was all explainable the residual 6% or 20%, depending on which statistics you're using, that's the UAP. So the legislation is focused on UAP. That's the main takeaway here. Alright, so I've got a couple slides on the executive summary. So what's the mechanics of this legislation? So we already said that we want to centralize the records.

(13:59)
So where we centralize the records is the national archive. So the archivist has got a role in this process, but they're also owners of the records. They're people that generated the records, organizations and government, and they're people that happen to have records that they may not have generated. So these are called government offices. These government offices are obligated to identify and transmit these records to the archivist. They've got to identify which records are UAP records based on how the legislation's written, and they've got to transmit those to the archivist. And the legislation gives them 300 days to do this. So nobody necessarily trusts that that's going to happen. And I think Tim's talk outlined and highlighted perhaps the fact that the government isn't a monolith, right? You've got a lot of different opinions going on, a lot of different organizational dialectic and dynamics going on and a lot of different agendas.

(14:56)
And so as we said earlier, there's got to be an enforceable and accountable process. So the central tenet of the Schumer amendment is to create this UAP record review board. And so this is very much analogous to what was done in the JFK Assassination Records Act of 1992, where an independent board was set up to review those records. But this legislation differs from that in several significant ways. Number one, obviously the problems are different. So in that case, it was more of a retrospective and historical understanding, and there's a finite set of records. Our problem here, it's an ongoing problem, records are continuing to be generated into the future, and there's this obvious technological surprise concern. There's an immediacy to this. So this records review board that's created is to consist of nine folks, and we'll get into the composition of that, but that board's going to have certain authorities to review what these offices submit.

(15:58)
So the going in position is, if it's a UAP records, it's got to get disclosed. If the office doesn't want disclosed, they got to make a case and why they don't want it disclosed. That case comes to the board and the board adjudicates that and recommends to the president. The oversight for this board is held in the Senate, Homeland Security and Government Accountability Committee, and in the House Oversight Committee Committee on Oversight and Government Affairs. Let's see, what else? Okay, so the other part of this is unlike JFK, there's the issue of materials. And so there's a couple other terms of art in here. TUO and NHI people are somewhat familiar with those, perhaps non-human intelligence. So biological evidence and non-human intelligence that's been talked about in open hearings and technology of unknown origin, the Schumer amendment that directs the federal government to exercise eminent domain over those.

(16:57)
And in this board is to adjudicate whether the stuff actually is TOO and NHI and whether it should be postponed or disclosed. And we'll get into some of the ramifications of that in a minute. So how's this board going to do this? They're going to develop a plan, and this is a big difference from the JFK legislation. So this plan for all records that they deem need to be postponed for whatever reason, has got to indicate a benchmark driven process with specified occurrences and timeframes for downgrading review and declassification for everything that's postponed. And then this plan supersedes all previous declassification guidance that may have been applicable to this material that's extremely important, that's different than the JFK. The JF was basically like, should we postpone or not? Okay? And then it gets kicked down the road. If they say postpone, Schumer basically says, if you're postponing, you got to tell me exactly what you got to do to release it in a benchmark driven plan.

(18:02)
And then this plan basically becomes the declassification guidance going forward. Now, the point is that the president ultimately has the sole and nondelegable authority. So Congress can't impinge upon presidential executive authority. So the president makes the ultimate decision based on these recommendations. But once the recommendations made, they're either immediately disclosed or as postponed as we said or put into, and the decisions put into the federal register within 14 days. So the president has to provide a reason to the board on what his decision is, both classified and unclassified. The unclassified reason gets published publicly within 14 days. The other point here is that all the records are to be disclosed within 25 years of the date of creation unless the president deems otherwise, and Congress is appropriated or authorized the appropriation of 20 million to do this. Alright, so I've got to move a little faster here.

(19:09)
So these are terms of reference in the legislation. So non-human intelligence, at least 18 times cited in there. Any sentient intelligent non-human life form, regardless of nature or ultimate origin that may be presume responsible for UAP based on the earlier definition or of which the federal government has become aware. Legacy program, all federal, state, local government, commercial industry, academic, private sector endeavors to collect exploit verse engineer, TOO or biological evidence of NHI, prosaic attribution. You remember this was in both of those terms, UAP and T and O, prosaic attribution, having a human either foreigner, domestic origin, so UAPs, non-human T and o, human technology of unknown origin. This is very important for the eminent domain clause. Any material or meta material, ejecta crash debris mechanisms, machinery, equipment, assemblies or sub assemblies, engineering models or processes, damage or intact aerospace vehicles or damage or intact ocean surface or undersea crap associated with UAP or incorporating science and technology lacking prosaic attribution or known means of human manufacture. So that's what eminent domain applies to. It's reasonably specific, I would say.

(20:30)
So this is the board. So there are nine members of the board, seven of those positions are specified explicitly, executive director, national security, official, foreign service, official scientist, economist, professional historian and sociologist. How are these come up determined? They were determined to align with the instruments of national power. So historically, instruments of national power are diplomatic, military and economic. There was a real vision of that over time that added information into that. They created this concept called dime, counterinsurgency coin came around and we realized, okay, there's external elements of power and there are internal elements of power that sort of align with the nature of sovereignty. So they expanded the definition to come up with dime fill, which adds law enforcement and intelligence and financial. And there's also the political element. So you've got eight elements of power plus an executive director. And the premise for this is that disclosure is going to happen using the instruments in national power, but disclosure also impacts the instruments in national power.

(21:29)
And so you need practitioners of the instruments in national power for the president to have confidence in the recommendations he or she's getting from this panel such that when he implements that decision, it's going to have a ramification that's understandable by people that are experienced in the field. So impartial citizens are to be appointed to the panel that aren't affiliated with any legacy program. We define what legacy program was earlier, that's a major exclusion. They are going to be of high national reputation. So unlike the JFK, we're talking about cabinet level deputies, we're talking about noble laureates, we're talking about people with the caliber of Abey Loeb or Gary Nolan maybe. And that's unsolicited. But frankly, we're talking about that caliber of person. And these people are going to be granted security clearances appropriate for the task through expedited means. So it's very important. Alright, precedence of work.

(22:29)
I'm not going to dwell on this too long. This is different than the JFK, but basically we're saying anything that's not already public is a high priority. The number one priority, anything that most unambiguously relates to the topic, right? Unambiguously, most unambiguously non-human anything subject to litigation, anything of the earliest providence. So that's the precedence of work stuff we don't know already and stuff that's eminent domain. So maybe we'll have some discussion after this. I want to kind of keep going through here. But there are legal pros and cons. Obviously if you've got an aversion to eminent domain, you probably had an aversion to this part of the statute. But the point here is the government wants to restore oversight and control of the material so it can make better progress scientifically on this. And so the challenge is does that affect intellectual property rights?

(23:24)
And the way the legislation written is it does not because any IP created out of the material is retained by the owner terms of reference disclosure. So the point here is there's a difference between controlled disclosure and catastrophic disclosure controlled disclosures using the campaign plan. Catastrophic disclosure I think was what was alluded to in the prior discussion where all the information is just dumped out there by an adversary or a non-human intelligence to create societal disruption. Alright? So this is an important slide because if we want to facilitate this board doing its work, then the barriers that impede that need to be lowered. And so you need to understand what the impediments are to disclosure. And so there's six reasons for non-disclosure, national security, lack of a plan, societal disruption, covert agreement cover from misdeeds and organizational and transitions. And you could just derive this from first principles.

(24:23)
And so a lot of this has been talked about already, but let's look at societal disruption, challenge to existing authority structures, ontological shock market crash, false authority syndrome, stagnation of initiative. All of these are issues that are preventing disclosure. They're going to impact the plan that the board develops. If you actually shred through these issues, you realize these are really not government issues. These issues are more effectively solved in the private sector and then academic sector in legal reviews and policy discussions in the natural sciences. So this tees up the opportunity for Saul Foundation and the members here to contribute to the solution of this plan because there's a linkage here. So there needs to be a campaign plan to synchronize all the sour argue. DOD is big into plan. So a campaign plan is like a plan about a plan. It's a meta plan.

(25:19)
So that means cost schedule performance is really not part of your campaign plan. It's just sort of like this is the direction we want to go. These are the ends, ways and means that we want to use. And this is the kind of shared consensus of what we're trying to do. And the shared consensus I would submit is we want proper oversight because we've got a government that's run by elected officials and ultimately they're accountable to the public and they've already recognized that they don't have the appropriate oversight. So we want to get oversight and we want to get disclosure, but we want to get it through a controlled process. We want to get it in a way that doesn't create the societal collapse like Eric Klein talked about in 1177 bc the system collapse of all the ancient societies. This is the order of the potential concern that might be happening here. And then the third piece is, what do we want to do about this problem? Well, we've got to actually address the scientific, technical, ethical, legal, religious aspects of this and more people need to be involved if we're going to make that progress. So this is the obligatory DOD type of campaign plan chart.

(26:23)
So yeah, we've had phase one. We've completed phase one, I would argue phase, phase one ends when we get Schumer. And so it says, demonstrate UAP existence by January of 24. And you're like, oh, that's crazy. That's never going to happen. It probably won't happen in my lifetime. I'm saying that that already happened. The gang of eight just said that we need this legislation and they don't have proper oversight. So disclosure is a process, it's not an event, and it's going to stair step across these phases. So phase two is where academia I think comes in. And then ultimately we get to the wider public and we see October, 2030 is maybe the pivot point when this board sunsets seven years for the board to do its job. But in order to facilitate the board doing its job, this philosophical investigation line of effort B, scientific investigation, line of effort, C and private sector investigation, line of effort D, is where we can all contribute to facilitating and lowering that potential barrier.

(27:27)
And so I've got maybe a minute or two, I'm going to just jump through a couple ideas that I've got for each of these lines of effort, if we might do that. So this is the government line of effort, pass Schumer, grant legal amnesty, centralize the data, create a Manhattan project to address this area, sponsor National Science Foundation, grants Charter and NIE, national Intel estimate to assess the public private positions of every country with this topic and where they are with it and use that to tee up and United Nation Summit or World Congress on developing new norms of behavior in this context, right? So that'd be a line of effort. A, what about line of effort? B, the humanities. I think we need a sociological model for analyzing the societal impact for disclosure and then developing mitigation strategies a priori to address that. Now, some people think that may be less of a concern or more of a concern.

(28:19)
It's kind of irrelevant. It's an unknown right now, but we need a plan to address it to lower that concern. Codify laws of ethics in an environment where we might have a hierarchy of being where everyone isn't necessarily having equal competitive potential. How do you, it's essentially translating our special relativity version of ethics to a general relativity version of ethics where you've got the problem of a more advanced civilization coming in and disrupting a less advanced civilization. It's the same issue with AI or colonialism or non-human intelligence. Alright, I don't have much time here, so we'll just go quick. Natural sciences. This was talked about extensively. One of the immediate areas that we can make progress is the material science arena. Gary talked about it. He recommended this area and it's definitely the case developing theoretical as well as practical methods to analyze metamaterials. And let's get to the point where we can actually talk about utilizing the, what is it, 339 isotopes and engineering materials out of that instead of the 118 elements that we've been sort of limited to.

(29:27)
Let's see. The other part here that might be relevant is why don't we actually get a canonical data set. I think Whitley actually asked this question, what's it take to make this data respectable to science and use this data set of cases and develop the canonical, temporal, geospatial and ontological range of distributions on what we're seeing here. And then do that in a way that actually is citable scientifically in papers so that we can build on work that's previously been done. There's huge amount of work that Jacques and others have done, but it doesn't seem to be cited in the literature. And perhaps because that we haven't constructed the dataset sufficient for it to be amenable for citation. And then we got to develop tipping and queuing methodologies for that. And then the private sector, we need to war game the business utility of forming consortiums to actually look at this material if the government was actually going to make it available.

(30:28)
Codify precedence and legal standards for determining intellectual property rights over the material, analyzing economic incentives and the impact to the economy if new energy sources were developed and advocating, as Gary has just talked about collaboration amongst these nonprofit and private sector. And so just in summary, I'd like to say disclosure is not a process, but the way to make progress is probably the way Diana outlined, which is this collaborative emergent interaction that creates more than the sum of the individual parts, which I think is what actually created and allowed Schumer to happen. It's a government first problem in the sense that the government has more and better information than everybody else, but that doesn't mean that everybody else has got to sit on the sidelines. The impediments to disclosure are really things that could be solved in the private sector, and it's a whole society problem. And I think it involves the humanities, the natural sciences, and everything that the foundation appears to be focusing on. So hopefully I didn't run over too long. I appreciate the opportunity to chat and.